The bigger issue with full Dex than armor is that you really need your damage to come from pierce/poison/bleeeding skills then. Because if based on weapons, you need a certain amount of Str-based physical damage to convert to piercing in the first place. For that I would go 2:1 Dex:Str at most.

And while the first option certainly works, it does make you a very specialized killer of living things.

The damage blocked should be after reductions.Regardless of the order, though, I think we can all agree that this is an added layer of defense, which by definition can only be beneficial. And that stopping ~1000 damage from going to your health up to 3 times per second is nothing to sneeze at.

And I don't mean this in a mean way, Hector, but there is an obvious mismatch between the amount of criticism you have for some skills and your understanding of them. While that is definitely not the only measure, there is a reason some of them are so popular. You just have to find the right use case.

In that case it is mostly a balance thing.Making Ice Shards physical would make logical sense, but it would also mean they scale with strength, and for that we already have Distortion Wave.While making them half physical would make them hard to scale / even more OP early on, especially since Storm has no combined phys+cold damage boosts like Earth has phys+fire.

Actually no, that story does not appear anywhere. The "xtag" and "our Lady" parts show that is was supposed to be in Hades, but apparently it was left out.Likely because in order to really do it justice, the game would need a higher age rating. Especially the part how she was conceived in the first place.

Items like "Demeter's Sorrow" (=Wintertime, when Kore is Persephone - also why she is "the breath of spring") allude to it, though, and the shrine in Corinth (which really existed btw) gives some pretty big hints that there is a gruesome story to be found behind it all.

there's a real agris helmet found in a cave in France.. i learned something new today

In fact many of the items are based on real ones. If you look for celtic / norse archeology or terms like Hochdorf, Hallstatt, La Tène, Gundestrupp or of course Heuneburg and Glauberg you may recognize a few more.